Time, verbs, and imagining events

Recent psycholinguistic research shows that grammatical aspect (imperfective, perfective) has a varying impact on language comprehension difficulty, based on the lexical aspect (activities, accomplishments) of the described event (Becker, Ferretti, & Madden-Lombardi, 2013; Yap et al., 2009). The present research examined the influence of these temporal constraints on people's ability to imagine events. Participants read cueing phrases that contained either accomplishments (build) or activities (run) that were grammatically marked as ongoing or completed (I was running/I ran). Slow cortical potentials were recorded while participants imagined events based on the phrases for 8 seconds. Results show that, for activities, participants had less difficulty imagining events cued by imperfective stimuli than by perfective stimuli. The opposite pattern was observed for accomplishments. It was also found that the first-person visual perspective was adopted more often for perfective than imperfective accomplishment stimuli, whereas no differences in visual perspective adoption were found for activity cues. This research provides neurocognitive and behavioural insight into how temporal information associated with verbs influences the cognitive effort required to imagine events as well as the phenomenological properties of the events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).